Today’s Writing Mission: Stretch six more sentences into paragraphs for a total of nine paragraphs, so far.

3. I climbed to the top of the PPL building because I promised, but it didn’t go the way I planned. When I finally made it as far up as the elevators allowed, I stepped outside and pressed myself against the wall. It wasn’t that windy. I’d checked the forecast and picked the least windy day I could find. Still, I needed the feeling of the bricks against every inch of my back. I promised myself I would touch the flag pole. It was the last thing on the list of Must-Dos that Chris and I made on our last birthday, when we turned 14, before everything changed.

4. The day before I turned 13, Charles chopped off his pinky. It ruined my birthday. I mean, he didn’t do it to ruin our trip to Wyoming to climb Devil’s Tower, but it had taken me nearly two years to convince my parents to let me do it, so yeah, I was a little pissed. I did stuff his loose pinky into a plastic baggie and cover it in ice, like they do on hospital shows. I’m not a monster.

5.I’m a little like a sphynx, the friendly, smart hairless cat, not the mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion. I don’t mean I resemble the cat physically, I am a short 13 year old girl with plain old brown hair that only grows to just below my shoulders, no matter how hard I try. I have a three-year-no-cutting streak to prove it. So my hair is not fabulous, but I’m not bald. The sphynx and I have other things in common, though. We’re both hilarious.

6. The day I died the flowers on the mophead hydrangea in our backyard finally returned. The detective assigned to my case didn’t notice. Why would he? Phin noticed, though.

7. I used to think there were two kinds of people in the world, the sunsets and the sunrises, but Prooba showed me the world’s more complicated than that. In the end, Prooba was my wisest teacher, even though she wasn’t meant to be a teacher at all. She was my next door neighbor. Our house was a four bedroom ranch, like most of the other ones in our neighborhood, but Prooba’s was a thin, three-story, the highest home in all of Afton Village. She was tall and thin too, just like her home. I can picture Prooba wearing that ancient blue grey Alsace linen shawl, standing on her third floor deck, watching over our neighborhood like a sentinel.

8. It would have been the perfect summer if Peter hadn’t stepped on that spike in the middle of Smurf Olympics. He did though, so Dad scooped him up and he and Buppy drove Peter to the hospital. I decided to stay home, or maybe they left me behind. The distinction wasn’t important in the drama of that moment, but over time, it has become the most crucial detail of my life.